The Human Side of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation often stirs feelings of fear and uncertainty,
particularly among employees worried about job security or their capacity to
embrace new technologies. Leaders should prioritize active listening and
demonstrate genuine empathy towards their concerns. This goes beyond merely
recognizing their fears; it involves grasping their viewpoints and discovering
solutions to alleviate their concerns. ... When employees feel excluded from the
digital transformation journey, the initiative is likely to falter. Effective
leaders understand that cultivating open communication is crucial for achieving
success. Regular meetings, town halls, and feedback loops can create an
environment where employees feel valued and actively participate in the decision
making process. When leaders nurture an open environment that invites employees
to share concerns and ideas, it enhances engagement and alleviates fears of
uncertainty. ... In situations like these, employees frequently venture beyond
their comfort zones to embrace new practices and technologies. Acknowledging
their contributions, whether significant or minor, can greatly enhance morale
and engagement. Leaders with emotional intelligence express gratitude, whether
through verbal recognition, presenting awards, or providing new growth
opportunities.
Breaking the cloud backup ‘black box’ with intelligent data mapping and retrieval
In this massive, fast-moving ecosystem, creating a cloud backup becomes quite a
task. First, one has to cover an endless, rapidly growing wave of cloud assets,
from every active application and database to resources that have been shut down
or moved. Then, after identifying the resources, they have to manually tag them
with metadata labels (key-value pairs for easier organization and filtering) and
create snapshots. These are point-in-time backups that can be configured with
varying retention periods, allowing users to restore the assets at any given
time within the retention window. Over the years, these snapshots have evolved,
providing enterprises with capabilities like automation (after initial
configuration) and encryption. ... At the core, Eon creates snapshots by
automating resource mapping, classification and policy association. It keeps on
scanning cloud resources on an ongoing basis, automatically mapping and
classifying them based on environment type—whether production, development,
staging, or QA—and data sensitivity, such as personally identifiable, health or
financial information. Once the resources are mapped, it applies customized
backup retention policies in line with the enterprise’s specific business and
compliance requirements. This ensures the data is not under or over-backed
up.
It’s Time to Fight For Personal Data Rights
At a time when massive companies fall victim to devastating hacks with alarming
frequency, the Change Healthcare hack stands out not just for its size but also
for the ways in which it highlights all that's broken with how we protect
people's personal information. ... It's imperative that federal legislators take
the opportunity to tackle this urgent vulnerability in society. To satisfy the
cybercriminals that extorted it, Change Healthcare paid a $22 million ransom,
yet sensitive data was still leaked onto the dark web and is probably still
available there. Meanwhile, my family was not notified that we were victims
until seven months after the hack occurred. Unlike the other data hacks for
which I had a clear customer or employment relationship with the hacked
organization, I did not know what Change Healthcare was. To my knowledge, I had
never dealt with Change Healthcare before. ... How did this company, which I had
never heard of before, have two of our most sensitive types of personal data?
And why were we informed over seven months after the fact, during which time
criminals could have been selling our data on the dark web or actively using
them to steal our identities?
Hard drives at the heart of AI innovation
Hard drives are indispensable in AI storage clusters due to their scalability,
cost-efficiency, and sustainability. Hard drives store 90 percent of exabytes in
the world’s largest data centers. Additionally, 90 percent of enterprise exabyte
workloads include AI data retention, analytics, and backup, which require high
capacity, yet relatively moderate data processing time. These workloads are best
suited for hard drives, thanks to the drives’ cost-per-terabyte advantage.
Recent advancements in hard drive areal density have enhanced both AI
performance and energy efficiency. ... Proactive storage capacity planning and
strategic sourcing for the long term is key for enterprises to unlock the full
value of AI data. Winning businesses are the ones that can increase storage
capacity dramatically while decreasing the total cost of ownership and resource
impact. ... The future of AI hinges on storage. As AI drives innovation, data
drives AI, and storage drives data. Advancing storage architecture will be
critical in realizing AI’s promise, and empowering businesses to stay ahead in
this transformative era. Emerging technologies such as DNA data storage and
quantum storage hold the potential to revolutionize the way we store and access
data, offering unprecedented capacity and speed.
Teaching The Board To Talk To CISOs
The Board is often a political arena, with various agendas at play. Without any
knowledge of the other issues and priorities currently under discussion at Board
level, and of the political struggles and personalities involved across the
Boardroom table, no executive can be expected to articulate anything genuinely
relevant to the Board. General cybersecurity knowledge and a sense of
perspective around risks and threats can be brought in by external experts or
non-executive directors, but the reality of the situation on the ground across
the firm can only come from the CISO, and they can only put it into context for
the Board if they are given a sense of context in the first place. This goes
beyond a broad sense of alignment between cyber strategy and business strategy:
It is about aligning cyber execution with business execution over time across
the strategic lifecycle; a lifecycle that can be disrupted by mergers,
acquisitions, the arrival of new executives at the top, new market
opportunities, technological evolutions or global events. Board members and
senior executives need to understand the essential nature of this alignment for
the CISO – or any other executive – to provide them with input, answer their
questions or address their concerns in a valuable and meaningful way.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Deep Dive into 25 Different Types of RAG
Corrective RAG functions as a real-time fact-checker designed to generate
responses and validate them against reliable sources to minimize errors. Its
architecture includes an error-detection module that identifies and corrects
discrepancies in the generated response before delivery. ... Speculative RAG
anticipates user needs by predicting queries and preparing relevant responses
ahead of time. This forward-thinking approach analyzes user context and
behavior to pre-fetch data, reducing response times and enhancing user
experience. ... Agenetic RAG offers adaptability by evolving with the user
over time learning preferences through repeated interactions. Unlike static
systems, Agenetic RAG dynamically refines its database and retrieval
processes, creating a personalized experience. ... Self-RAG is an autonomous
architecture focused on continuous improvement. It evaluates the accuracy and
relevance of its responses, iteratively refining its retrieval methods. ...
Adaptive RAG excels at adjusting its responses based on real-time changes in
user context or environmental factors. This flexibility allows it to maintain
relevance even in dynamic scenarios.
Resistance to digital transformation change in financial services is to be expected
Digital transformation projects can bring about major changes within
organisations which may meet inherent cultural resistance. An inability to
change mindsets can still pose significant barriers to transformation success.
Whilst we are seeing the insurance industry start to embrace and accelerate
change, some parts are steeped in traditions and legacy models. Some
colleagues can view implementing digital tools as a threat to their job,
rather than an enabler or a way to enhance their ways of working. To overcome
this mindset, insurance leaders need to make a concerted effort to demonstrate
the tangible benefits of digital adoption. For instance, increased efficiency
gives agents more time for the customer, to have innovative thoughts and for
sharing ideas to improve customer service. At this stage communication is key
to effectively demonstrate the vision, emphasising the benefits colleagues
will gain from digital tools. We’ve seen some of this within developer
communities for example, with the impact of GitHub Co-pilot on their jobs.
It’s important to clearly explain the positive impact tools can have on a
colleague’s role and how it can work alongside, not instead of, them to
increase their efficiency and job satisfaction.
As Supply Chains Go Digital, Cybersecurity Must be Strongest Link
Cybercriminals increasingly view supply chains as lucrative targets,
exploiting their interconnected nature to launch ransomware attacks, steal
sensitive data or disrupt operations. A single weak link — be it a poorly
secured vendor or an outdated system — can expose an entire network to
vulnerabilities, and attacks often exploit third-party vendors who may lack
robust security protocols. Citing the recent CrowdStrike cyber incident as an
example, Regina Lewie, senior vice president and chief risk officer at
Corporate One Federal Credit Union, told PYMNTS that the new threat landscape
can be full of surprises for unprepared businesses. “Even without direct
involvement, we had to react quickly to protect our members and maintain
trust,” she said, noting that third-party risk management is a growing focus.
... “The barrier for entry has never been lower for threat actors,” Discover®
Global Network Chief Information Security Officer Sunil Mallik told PYMNTS in
July. And while regulations can help provide a baseline, proactive companies
are going beyond that to build resilience into their system. “We’ve needed to
rethink, from the ground up, how we architect security,” Mastercard Chief
Product Officer Jorn Lambert told PYMNTS in October.
Open source spirit: elevating team collaboration and innovation
Open source foundations play a vital role in building communities, setting
guidelines, and fostering collaboration. They sit in the middle as a “neutral
body” since, open source thrives on collaboration rather than confrontation.
This is where open source foundations come in—they help negotiate between the
interests of maintainers and adopters and empower contribution. While some
open source projects thrive without the backing of a formal foundation, a
neutral body is often essential for nurturing a strong community and ensuring
the long-term success of both the project and its technology stack. Without
such an entity, it can be much more difficult to build and sustain a
community, which in turn hampers the future development of the project. ...
Playing a more active role in open source comes with some risks due to the
chaotic nature of the space. Still, I believe that to be a leader in
technology, it’s important to take these risks intentionally and benefit from
shaping technology not just for your customers but also for everyone else. As
explored, there are plenty of motivations for it. A question remains when more
traditional companies that rely on software now and in the future to stay
competitive will reach digital maturity to contribute to open source like
digital natives.
Flexible Chips: A Catalyst for Realizing the Internet of Everything (IoE)
Flexible integrated circuits based on thin-film technology don’t require the
complex, high-temperature processes inherent in silicon chip fabrication.
Instead, they use a simple spin-coating technique, where polyimide is applied
to a glass carrier. This allows fabrication at much lower temperatures, which
significantly reduces the use of energy, water, and harmful chemicals. In
turn, this slashes carbon emissions while also cutting down on set-up costs
and production timelines. Using this method, flexible chips can be produced in
just four weeks. This speed opens new possibilities for innovation: designers
no longer need to get it ‘right first time’, as the rapid cycle times enable
on-the-fly design adjustments, and iterative improvements as requirements
change. ... The ultra-low cost and reduced carbon footprint of flexible chips
position them as ideal candidates to embed into everyday objects. These
qualities make them perfectly suited for IoE applications, where they can
generate vast amounts of data to fuel AI models, enabling greater efficiency
and actionable insights at scale. In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG)
sector, this connectivity could facilitate item-level product verification or
one-tap consumer interactions, creating more personalized
experiences.
Quote for the day:
"Good content isn't about good
storytelling. It's about telling a true story well." --
Ann Handley
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